I watched the Hitchcock film "The Man Who Knew Too Much" tonight. It had been given away free in the Times. It's the
1934 one with Peter Lorre in it (apparently he couldn't speak English at the time and learned his lines phonetically (which is maybe why he laughs after nearly everything he says, just to be on the safe side because he doesn't know if it's a joke or not).
The film seems very quaint and old fashioned, though it's astonishing to think that a film of this sophistication was being made this early - talkie films had only come in less than a decade before. Though the RP accents are a bit laughable and the little girl is quite annoying and you hope she might be killed by the villains and the plot doesn't quite make sense it's an enjoyable 82 minutes and not bad for the price of a newspaper.
Obsessed with mortality, as I seem to be, I couldn't get over the fact that probably everyone I was watching was long dead, some 71 years after filming, but was able to use the internet to discover whether the child star,
Nova Pilbeam is still alive. And amazingly she still is, which is some comfort to me.
Alas the same can not be said of my favourite character, the police marksman with a rather severe haircut, who moves a mattress to the window he is going to shoot from and comments salaciously that it is still warm from the young lady who was sleeping in it. His colleague chastises him for his sauciness and tells him he will tell his wife (though it doesn't seem that bad a thing to say to me). Then they get to the window and accidentally send the blind shooting up and gun shots ring out towards them. And the mattress moving copper is dead. But how much we learned about him in those brief seconds. Well thanks to the marvelous
imdb website I discover he was called Frank Atkinson (though he was uncredited in the film - unforgivable) and he lived on until 1963 and was working right up to the end. He also did some writing in the 30s and then again in the 50s and was a circus performer. How brilliant that you can find out so much about someone relatively obscure so quickly. Frank Atkinson is my new hero. He was born in 1893. He's like an historical figure.
Cicely Oates who played Nurse Agnes was not so lucky and in fact died in 1935 at just 45 years of age (though she looks way older than that in the film). I can't find out how or why she died thought. The internet has let me down (though I haven't tried too hard to find out).
I lay in bed afterwards wondering if the Universe was about to be destroyed by
The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Apparently there's not much chance of it creating a black hole and if it does then Stephen Hawkings says that it will just disappear, but that lack of certainty is slightly worrying. It would be funny though if the experiment did cause the Universe to implode. I hope the bloke who presses the button to start the whole thing has time to realise it's gone wrong so he can go,"Ooops!" before everything is sucked into the vortex he has just created. Though it would be a shame for everything to be crushed into protons (or whatever would happen), but it would make me laugh to think that ultimately the end of the world would be down to the Swiss. Once again I think that Al Qaeda can just sit back and not worry too much about blowing stuff up - we're going to fuck things up quite nicely ourselves. If not this week, then at some point. But it was weird to think that something could happen that would not just wipe out the human race (a good thing) but actually destroy the whole planet and solar system. Then there would be absolutely nothing left to show that we had existed (except rather aptly a big black hole). Weirdly I found that a bit unsettling. Not the deaths of everyone I know (and don't know) but the fact that nothing that anyone had ever done would be left for future aliens to find.
I am weird.
With a bit of luck the experiment will just discover that the dark matter is in fact God, holding all the Universe together with his invisible hands. And the scientists will make him appear in their underground chamber, which will be a bit of a surprise for most of them.
I am all for the advancement of science though. I think scientists are the only hope for saving the world (even though they're partly to blame for fucking up the environment) and maybe this experiment will help them come up with a way of reversing global warming or giving us more command over the elements. Yes, they might destroy all God's creation in the attempt, but it's worth the gamble.
My theory is that the scientists will actually create the actual Big Bang that started the whole Universe and that time is cyclical and everything will just start up again. So we need the experiment to happen, because even though it will destroy the Universe it will also create it.
Don't you just love ignorant people making up their own ideas about something they know nothing about?
